and still he got no response. Our young man was feeling dazed and rather cross, and was about to shout his question for the third time, when he observed, greatly to his surprise, that the other officer was speaking to him-that is to say, his lips were moving, but our Ensign heard nothing.

Then the officer put his hands to his mouth and bawled: "I'm-... Stokes mortars you know me

...

you dined with us the other night!" Our Ensign explained that he had just been blown up and realised that he was almost deaf. Presently their ways parted, and our Ensign was once more trudging on alone.

He orossed a trench where Guardsmen were digging in furiously among a lot of German corpses, passed a Tank on the extreme left, apparently stranded and looking forlorn but intact, met other troops of German prisoners, each bigger than the last, shuffling along at their brisk, characteristic amble, reached the top of the ridge, and plunged into a network of broken barbed wire. There the bullets were humming, and men were shouting and shooting furiously from a crowded trench just in front of him, while in the distance he heard the "tack-tack" of machine-guns and the reverberating explosions of bombs. Bending low our Ensign pelted through the wire, and sprang into a dense throng of men in the trench.

THE Dal, whose beauties were so opulently chanted by Tom Moore, is something more than a piece of exquisite water. It is a world in itself. Here are fields, and orchards whose bloom drifts upon the lucent waters, and meadows enamelled with purple and gold; splendid trees-the chinar, the poplar, and the apricot, and willows by the waterways; houses of the great and the humble, and gardens of the emperors; sheep feeding in the grassy glades, and black cattle; the ploughman behind his steers; little fish speeding like arrows through the limpid water; halcyons display. ing their turquoise wings, and bulbuls singing in the willows, and turtle-doves whose music fills the morning. Here are canoes carrying the people about their daily avocations, with women in them and lovely children, and barges laden with the produce of the islands; shikaras that wait in line behind the flood-gates, like gondolas at St Mark's. Here are the floating gardens of Kashmir, and the gardeners at work carrying fresh soil across the lake where it

widens, while their puntingpoles shine like silver in the sunlight, and one who is lovesick sings a gazal in the stern. The gardens look like firm earth till you move away a yard or two, and then see them suspended in the lustrous water, while the dragonflies flash about them with incredible speed.

And ever beyond these there are the white snows and Solomon's Throne, and the blue uprising mountains with their shining peaks and shadowy valleys, imaged in the lake.

It is a place that is apt to spoil one; its beauty, like that of the woman who loves one, is so accessible, its charm so little concealed. You have but to call a shikara, and in a moment you are launched upon its joys.

You leave for it, it may be, at early dawn, before the melting snows have raised the level of the river and so closed the great sluice-gates of the lake. Early as is the hour, life is already afoot. Here is a man standing placidly in the water taking his morning ablation, and here are many more, with the early light shining

upon their faces, absorbed in the morning prayer. The boats are moving, and the day has begun.

The sun is not yet risen behind the Takht-i-Sulaiman, but Hara Parbat is already bathed in an amber glow of light, a beautiful proud castle on its hill. Upon the far snows of Tata Kuti and the Pir Pantsal the sun had long been shining, but the Eastern mountains behind whose sierras his orb is concealed are yet wrapped in deep violet shadows, where the Nishat Bagh and the Shalimar still slumber in the embraces of Night. The waters below and about us are grey and green and gleaming with light, birds are a-wing, and the sounds of increasing day are abroad: the plash of oars, the voices of women, the twittering cheep of the swallows as they swiftly skim the water, the strident crowing of cocks.

See the red heifer in the morning sun, the whole pose of her body receptive of his warmth and light; the boats stealing through the green willows like phantoms of the morning; the white geese sailing with their little families like a fleet abroad; the orioles flitting like shafts of sunlight through the glades.

We come to Kraliyar, where a temple with its silvered roof is shining in the sun, and its stairs and carved balconies over the water are crowded with Brahmins bathing and at prayer. The ritual they are at is incomparably old. Beyond the temple there is a beautiful old bridge of Mogul days, with the name of the builder written

in marble under its shadowy arches, and about it a cluster of many houses, with high garden walls hung with vines and alive with the dancing of water-gleams over wall and leaf. Red roses droop from the garden pavilions, and a field of white iris is as moonlight in the morning. Hereabouts is a big shepherd carrying sheaves of young willow-shoots to his goats, while his children play by the water. One of them, a little girl of five, consents to be made a picture of, but holds her very heart with fear; and finally breaks into tears, though she goes bravely through the awful ordeal to its close.

The home of this family is upon an island that rises about a foot above the lake, and is ringed about with white poplars. Upon its outskirts there are water-lilies and neat willows, and upon its edges there lie the last clods of earth and fibre from the lake bed that have been added to its sum. Within this miniature embankment there are fields and orchards. In the centre there is the house, tall and doublestoried, of brown wood, with a thatched roof; and about this little inclusive world there is an expanse of clear waters, and high mountains whose shadows change and swoon upon its surface.

Twenty years ago, when this man was still a lad, this homestead had not emerged from the waters of the lake. One cannot grudge him his possession; yet it is this ceaseless hunger for firm earth which is gradually narrowing the

borders of the Dal, and will one day convert one of the loveliest waters of the world into fields and tenements.

As we approach the Nishat Bagh the environment changes subtly from peasant homes in a fen country, from the pleasant scenes and events of rural life, to something that is visibly superb and noble. For here the mountains are very near, and their giant masses stand up above the lake

"Like the thrones of Kings."

Deep blue shadows lie about them, giving a lustre to their surface, and steep valleys fall profoundly to the water.

Yet between them and the lake there is room for an Imperial Garden.

The still noon, as we draw near it, is resonant with the crooning of doves, whose music is borne as if by enchantment across the unruffled mirror of the lake. A high-backed bridge makes a water-gate or portal to the garden and its imperial pavilions. A man who passed it in bygone days must have known that he was now entered upon the dangerous precincts of the Court.

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Every step I take in this wonderful valley carries me into possession of something that is yet more exquisite, till my power of expression is numbed, and my senses overcome by a beauty I cannot yet grasp or describe. I am thus in a position to sympathise with the Court poet at the coronation of the Emperor, upon whom a fresh robe of

honour was flung with each verse that fell from his lips!

I have a suspicion as I enter the Nishat Bagh that the Door of Paradise has been opened, and that I have been led by some Peri by the hand to look upon what must surely be the most wonderful view in the world.

I speak not of the garden rising in imperial terraces, with a lavishness of space and of height beyond height, to the overwhelming line of the mountains; for as yet I have had no power to advance beyond the first pavilion of the garden. To this I am tied as by the Peri's wand, and I am content to sit by the marble throne upon which so many that were great and splendid in their day reposed -Shah Jahan, who so loved his dear lady of the Taj, Dara unwitting of his terrible end, and Aurangzeb, whose cold heart was set upon other things than the beauty of this world. Reclining here in the noonday peace, I look upon the same marvellous picture that they, and so many more whose names are writ in water, must have looked upon. Even now it is something of an exelusive view, for the door which admits me into this belvedere is closed behind me, and I am the sole tenant with the birds of this magic chamber looking out upon a scene of fairy beauty.

How shall I record its loveliness?

There is in truth the lake before me, a great pool of tranquil water, blue where the sky

looks into it, white and opal where the ascending clouds throw their living image upon it, still as if an enchantment lay upon it; like a sheet of silver here, like an embroidered carpet there, where the waterlilies rise upon their slender filaments to its surface, to lap at ease above the hidden world below; so wide and calm that it looks of kin with infinite space, yet defined by shadowy trees which hang, as it were, between water and heaven; by hamlets and villages, whose brown roofs mingle with the natural world; by a castle set upon a hill, the image of an Hellenic Acropolis, yet touched with I know not what suggestion of a Monastery upon a hill in which some Buddhist Pope might have his habitation, aloof from the sorrow, the transitoriness, and the illusion of Life; and yet again, defined by mountains so vast and so far-uplifted into heaven that they might be the very thrones of God.

Blue they are and silver in their valleys and snow-white upon their heights, yet in this fierce noonday sun, all molten into one marvellous prism of light. So great they look with the white cloud-towers mingling with their summits that they seem to have no limits to their greatness.

Thus you have mountain and sky and water and a castle upon a hill, and the tale might be thought complete were it not for some one whose instinct for perfection added a bridge, high-arched as of olden days, dark and shadowy in the

midst of this lustrous world. A thin line like a thread of green connects it at either end with the substantial earth, and cattle steal out from the woods and cross this filament of road, and ascend and descend the high arch of the bridge like phantoms shaped in velvet.

And yet again there are boats that come from the city, laden with veiled women and flowerfaced children, and slowly they steal across the water, every form and line reflected in its magic surface, till they touch the landing-stairs-as of old an emperor might have done-and so pass into the enchanted garden.

Nor is this all; for nearest of all, below the black marble throne, is the high stone wall of the garden with its vases filled with purple, and a pool with fountains set amidst the grass, upon which and the bordering roses their spray falls like mist. And upon either side of this there are far-reaching thickets of Persian lilac still in bloom.

Inside the pavilion, from which all these wonders are meant to be seen, there is silence, and there are veiled shadows, and the wistful peace of a day that has gone for ever. In the place of the magnificent lord who built it, of the mighty emperor who claimed to hold the world in fee, of the lovely women chosen for their perfection to add the last touch to this place of superlative excellence, there are little sparrows building their nests under the fretted eaves, and rooks that chaffer within the inner court,